Photography by Toma Peiu, Luiza Pârvu

Exhibited as a part of “Naryn-Syr Darya: Three River Stories”
Visit online exhibition here

Message in a Bottle: River Flows is a photographic series capturing everyday landscapes from the Aral Sea basin. The Naryn-Syr Darya flows down from the Tien Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan through the Fergana Valley and then into the Kazakh steppe, towards the North Aral Sea.

By placing these images in conversation, we suggest the interactions between this body of water – sometimes flowing freely, other times static, the people and landscapes that it connects.

This series is a “message in a bottle” between Shamaldy-Sai (Kyrgyzstan) on the Naryn river; Kyzylorda and Birlik (Kazakhstan) on the Syr Darya; Aral (Kazakhstan) and Muynaq (Qaraqalpaqstan, Uzbekistan), the two port towns that used to lie on the shores of the sea. We hope that it inspires new conversations between these communities and the geographical and cultural legacy that connects them.

January 2021

Produced as a part of The “Social Life” of a River: environmental histories, social worlds and conflict resolution along the Naryn-Syr Darya, a multi-year multimodal research project led by Dr. Jeanne Féaux de la Croix at the University of Tübingen – Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Luiza Pârvu, Toma Peiu

Sound, video, photography
Conceived for S3026 – Boulder CO – July 2020

Stay-at-home. What are the sounds that shape the experience of confined urban domesticity? How are space and time mediated differently in neighboring ecosystems?

An apartment and a meadow: staying at home and being at home, sensed and projected through biological and technological bodies, marked by everyday routines.

The sole visitor employs their body as a cyborg, to encounter multi-dimensional places and events through pre-recorded sound and sight. Existing in isolation and in correspondence, distinct experiences bleed into one another through interchangeable soundtracks and imagery, both still and moving.

What are the limits of mediation? How is perception challenged in technologically reproducible environments? How does the imagined dichotomy between nature and culture inform the ways in which humans navigate and represent place?

Using monitors, headphones and projection, This is a Pre-Recorded Experience makes these questions audible for and visible to the visitors of S3026, in a unique historical and technological moment.

A situation and site specific work by Root Films

Luiza Parvu, Toma Peiu

video, color, 14 mins, 2019

Public space interactions between human, non-human, and water bodies, in the town of Moynaq, Qaraqalpaqstan, Uzbekistan. Between dematerialization and embodiment, the scarce supply of water determines the uses of shared space, mediating the rituals of the organic and inorganic everyday.

Only a generation ago, Muynaq was a port town by the Aral Sea, one of the world’s largest endorheic lakes. Today, it is the one of the most arid places on the planet and the site of “the world’s largest man-made ecological disaster”, according to the United Nations.

The climate is deteriorating, with toxic salt-and-sand storms increasing in frequency. The summer of 2018, when these scenes were captured, was one of the hottest on record.

For locals, nostalgia and hopes for the return of the absent sea have given way to more pragmatic expectations of wise management of the current hydrological resource, trickling North from the depleted Amu Darya river, as well as hopes for economic revival reliant upon the budding extraction industry and migrant labor in Kazakhstan and Russia.

This short film premiered as a video installation at WILD | TAME – an exhibition curated by NEST @ SEEC University of Colorado Boulder: February 21st – May 23rd, 2019.

Generously supported by the 2018 NEST Graduate Fellowship.

Multimedia installation by Toma Peiu, Alice F. Hill, Luiza Parvu, Peter Cusack, Timothy Dunn, 2018

Between the concepts of “migrant labor” and “virtual water”, we examine connections of the missing water to the missing people of the Aral Sea basin in Central Asia: a vast ecosystem whose arid, dry downstream flatlands are shaped by the state’s decision to pursue centralized agriculture, and whose upstream water sources in the high mountain glaciers of the Pamir and Tien Shan ranges are now increasingly affected by climate change.

A media archaeological toolbox juxtaposes bibliography, datasets and observation with immersive 360 video, animated satellite imagery, sound maps, personal narrative, and 3D film photography, to critically capture the memory and metamorphosis of the environment and public urban space, under stress from the commodification of water, land, and labor. All of the individual components are mobile / portable / low fi, so that they may be accessible to a variety of publics in any kind of venue, with a few to no technological requirements.

How do flows of water, land, and labor shape the future of our planet in a context of growing inequality between those who control resources, and bodies subjected to increased regulation? We imagine a research model able to look beyond discipline-specific narratives and to reveal the ripple effects of the economy of water in the Aral Sea basin by placing them at the center of the world.

Composed of four distinct pieces:

Message in a Bottle: Field Diary

Toma Peiu, Luiza Parvu
Media: retroviewer, 35mm Kodak Ektar film, headset, MP3 player, text and voice over narration

Welcome to Muynaq (2018)
Railroad tracks in former port (Aral, 2018)
Former fish processing station (Muynaq, 2018)
Crane (Muynaq, 2018)
Fishermen and construction (Muynaq, 2018)
Shipyard bay (Aral, 2018)
Taxi station (Muynaq, 2018)

accompanied by audio / spoken word and printed text of Samples from a Field Diary

written & read by Toma Peiu
photo & sound editing by Luiza Parvu
as written and discussed with Luiza, Makhmud, Sagit, Yusup, Ali, Aman

On the Bottom of the Sea

Toma Peiu, Luiza Parvu
Media: 360 video, sound, headset, mobile phone

7 landscapes from a former seabed

Smoke (Muynaq, 2018)
Salt (Aral, 2018)
Fish (Muynaq, 2018)
Camels (Aral, 2018)
Bottle (Muynaq, 2018)
Cows (Muynaq, 2018)
Ship + insects (Muynaq, 2018)

Virtual Water

Alice Hill, Timothy Dunn, Toma Peiu
blackout cotton, dyed linen, cotton flowers, 2D animation, projector

Global trajectories of virtual water cotton exports from the Aral Sea basin: 1960 – 2016

“Virtual water” refers to the water exported by way of water used to produced a traded commodities.

Data sources:

1960-1971 Exports of cotton from USSR, by country of destination: USDA Foreign Agriculture Service Cotton Production Report (1973)

1979 Exports of cotton from USSR, by country of destination: USSR trade yearbooks (http://istmat.info/node/21347 )

1988-2016 total annual cotton export quantity per country: USDA Foreign Agriculture Service PSD database (https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline)

1995-2016 Central Asian raw cotton export distribution as a relative percent to export destination countries: MIT Observatory of Economic Complexity (https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en)

Water use estimations for raw cotton yields: Waterfootprint.org

USGS time series of processed Landsat aerial images

Shamaldy-Say sound map

Peter Cusack
Media: interactive sound map, headphones, ipad

The Shamaldy-Say sound map is part of “Aral Sea Stories”, a project that explores the environment and culture of the Aral Sea and Syr Darya / Naryn river system through sound. Шамалды Сай / Shamaldy-Say in Kyrgyzstan is a significant point along the way. The town was built together for the hydroelectric dam nearby – the last in a linked series of five – in the 1950s, during Soviet times. The surrounding agricultural economy is completely dependent on the river flow. The sounds of the river itself, the canals, irrigation channels in the fields are intertwined with folklore related to water.

Recordings made in April 2018, as a part of a weeklong interdisciplinary flash study:

The Social Life of a River: Knowing the Naryn – directed by Dr. Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and the Anthropology Department at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

Explore the Interactive Sound Map of Shamldy-Say

Supported by the NEST Graduate Fellowship 2018, awarded to Toma Peiu & Alice F. Hill

Premiered at Embryonic @ NEST Studio for the Arts, September 22nd – December 21st, 2018

Video, chairs and spatialized stereo sound

Toma Peiu & Luiza Pârvu

Seven Scenes from a Neighborhood Café uses single take scenes and location sound recorded at Cafe Lily’s, an unpretentious Korean-Uzbek-Soviet diner at the heart of the Russian speaking community in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, NY. There can be no community without communion, and communion only becomes tangible when a genuine connection is achieved. To experience the installation, the visitor needs to approach the projection screen and the amplified column-speakers, using their body as a contact microphone. Mirroring the exercise of community making, intimacy with the medium and the place evoked by the installation becomes a condition for the relation between the artifact and the person seeking to engage with it.

Paper, silk, ballpoint pen, 2-channel spatialized sound

Toma Peiu, Luiza Pârvu

A sculptural sound & text piece speculating on a fairy tale translation.

“The Golden Fish” is a fable about a kindhearted fisherman who becomes a khan. Disappointed in the decadence of aristocracy, he eventually decides to live and work in his village of old for the rest of his life. Referencing a widespread ritual of secondary school education in the socialist world, the tale is transcribed in cursive, over silk ribbon in the colors of the flag of Uzbekistan. The visitor engages both with a mass produced story-container – in the scanned version of the book; and with a multimedia, site-specific installation. By having to walk in circles and duck in order to read and to touch the ribbon with their hands and ears, to listen to the sounds of water amplified within the column, the visitor experiences distinct layers of meaning, referencing the process of folklore transmission. The piece is inspired by the alternative embodiments of the Aral Sea, and by questions about the promises made and legacies claimed by the emerging nation state.

video, sound, chairs, table – installation, 2018

Toma Peiu, Luiza Pârvu

Inspired by the work of visual artist Julian Rosenfeldt, we announced a “speechless” faux press conference in one of the rooms at the San Jose Sheraton Hotel’s Conference Center, where delegates to the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Meeting were invited to take a seat and “listen” to protagonists whose presentations had been stripped of words. Motion and sound are broken down, fragmented, to direct attention to body language and production design that enhance the eeriness of powerful protagonists captured in a moment of heightened vulnerability – what I called “Nietzsche’s will to power at its most vulnerable.”

Staged at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Sheraton Hotel, Sacramento Room – November 16th, 2018.

7-channel video (incl. 2 channel live filming & streaming), 2-channel teleprompter, sound – installation, 2017

Toma Peiu, Luiza Pârvu

Failure is Human is an archival-based audiovisual creative project that I started in 2017. Several creative iterations have come out of this.

The project critically looks at what might be learned from the juxtaposition of re-appropriated broadcast performances of admissions of failure, concession, guilt or embarrassment in a hyper-mediated public space. The work is not about the immediately obvious protagonists, but rather about the cracks in the ways technology is used to enact and translate dynamics of power manifested in the political status quo.

Televised rituals are enacted using performance, or decorum tropes – the tone of voice, the gaze, the costume; tropes of language, including references to the myths of the nation-state, dominant religion and democracy; and tropes of staging – the Presidential Hall, the podium / desk, the slow zoom-in / zoom-out between the medium close shot and the close-up of the speaker. This mixture is evidence of the permeability between the embodiment of political power, redemptive memory, the methods of performing arts and broadcast technologies.

Redemption Room is a moving image and sound installation deconstructing the language and theater of failure, excuse, admission of guilt or “unsuccess” in televised political performance. In the eventful year 2016, the televised concession seemed to be one of the preferred narratives of televisions around the world. Considering Alexander Galloway’s definition of the “interface” as effect / process, rather than “thing”, we wondered where the form was coming from, and, following in Julianne Rebentisch’s footsteps, what the role of the teleprompter was in the aestheticization of democratic life.

Visitors are invited to step inside a television studio where various political leaders are competing for the soundscape. Their speeches are scrolling on two teleprompters fixed to large studio cameras, that are also broadcasting from within the installation space – into the lobby.

Staged in the CMCI ATLAS Television Studio as a part of DISAVOWAL – a Critical Media Practices showcase, December 1st – 2nd, 2017.